Fat cells could provide the key to a longer life
...tion factor dFOXO in the fat cells of female fruit flies from the onset of adulthood increased lifespan by between 20 and 50 per cent and reduced fertility by 50 per cent. But no effect was observed in male flies. "The functions of fruit fly fat include many of the metabolic activities of mammalian liver a...Parting genomes: UA biologists discover seeds of speciation
... for interbreeding, Reed says, suggests that these flies are on the verge of evolving to become completely separate species. Another finding adds support to that notion. Researchers had previously reported that for one strain of D. mojavensis, from Catalina Island, off the southern California coast, mother...Tiny tango: Device sorts microscopic particles with speed and precision
...a deterministic (non-random) way to do this really flies in the face of conventional wisdom," said Austin. "It's something I never would have thought of." The device could greatly speed up and expand many areas of biological research and could largely replace some centrifuge devices that are comm......ever before, Tatar says, has it been seen in fruit flies whose 13,601 genes are shared in many ways by hum... researchers created a line of genetically altered flies which had dFOXO a protein controlled by the fly equivalent of insulin inserted into the genetic ma...Floods, bugs and Hollywood disasters
...nhappy about the floods of spring. To pesky black flies and blood-thirsty mosquitoes, the flood is the equivalent of a newlywed pad — a place to make lots of whoopee and raise a passel of baby bugs, said Rich Merritt, chairman of entomology at Michigan State University. "With two kinds of breeding en...More news in the battle between the sexes
...avid Hosken from the University of Zrich subjected flies to experimental evolution for 44 generations and looked at the fitness consequences of evolving under high, low, or relaxed sexual conflict. Their results indicate that foreign males from the conflict populations are more costly to females than famil...Study of Cape Cod Seashore finds off-road vehicles harmful to beach fauna
...ators and extreme temperatures; several species of flies use it as a site to lay their eggs; and wolf spiders migrate back and forth from the beach grass to the wrack to feed on small crustaceans called amphipods. "Some species, like beach hoppers, are very susceptible to drying out in immature stages, so ...Super-effective 'jumping gene' created
...- has been crucial in understanding genes in fruit flies and yeast, and now we should be able to do it fairly efficiently in mice," says Boeke, whose lab is already starting to develop the necessary technology. Based on his research, Boeke suggests that the genes' DNA is much more than just "junk" in ou...Stem cells toward sperm cells and back again
...edical Sciences. "But we've clearly shown in fruit flies that lost sperm-making stem cells can be replaced,...specialized cells." The Hopkins team studied fruit flies whose "don't-specialize" signal for stem cells can be turned on or off by changing the temperature a...Biologists uncover genetic links to broad range of human disorders resulting from cilia dysfunctions
...red a number of key genes that humans, mice, fruit flies and roundworms all need to produce hair-like cellu...y's back bristles, a form of sensory cilia used by flies to sense their position in space and steer as they fly (see photograph). "Using Drosophila, we were ...Study in flies allows researchers to visualize formation of a memory
...ing to visualize changes in nerve connections when flies learn. These changes may be the beginning of a co...lor College of Medicine in Houston developed fruit flies with special genes that caused the flies' neuronal connections to become fluorescent during nerve si...Analysis uncovers critical stretches of human genome
...it is more closely related to vertebrates than are flies or worms. "The most exciting thing for me is that the ultra-conserved regions we have identified do represent evolutionary innovations that must have happened sometime during vertebrate development, because we see such large pieces that no longer mat...Researchers string together players in pesticide resistance orchestra
...r expression, of their genetic traits in resistant flies signifies they may be part of the orchestra that leads to resistance," Pittendrigh said. "But more research must be conducted before we claim whether any of these genes actually cause resistance. "Another interesting finding that emerged from our stu...Fly with brain tumor may shed light on cancer causing genes
...on of genes changes when the brain tissue of fruit flies becomes cancerous is published this week in BMC Ge... levels of gene expression in the heads of healthy flies and those with brain cancer. They found significant changes in the expression levels of 321 differen...Purdue scientists finding ways to outsmart crop-damaging bugs
...ss-resistance toxin. They found that the resistant flies were highly susceptible to one compound called deltamethrin. Use of deltamethrin dramatically reduced the numbers of pesticide-resistant insects in a fruit fly population. The researchers used DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as their base chemi...Devastating parasitic weed may be felled by toxin borrowed from flies
...s not entirely serendipity. Westwood explains that flies must have defense systems to protect themselves from microbes considering their life styles. "They carry defenses with a broad spectrum of activity. Sarcotoxin attacks the membranes of many different bacteria, but is relatively safe for higher organ...Tips from the Journals of the American Society for Microbiology
...nd California found that the saliva of female sand flies may be a contributing factor in a disease they tra...ed injections of salivary gland extracts from sand flies combined with L. amazonensis. Those mice developed earlier onset of disease, larger lesions, and hig...Tissue cells can revert to stem cells
...only reverted stem cells were as fertile as normal flies throughout adult life. "For most stem cells, it has not been possible yet to determine how quickly their progeny cells lose the ability to function again as stem cells," Spradling noted. "In the fruitfly (Drosophila) ovary we could directly t...Researchers model embryo implantation and tumour metastasis in fruit flies
...e proteins - called integrin and basigin - between flies and mammals, whose ancestors diverged over 500 mil...nd the result is death of the embryo." While fruit flies develop quite differently from humans, there is remarkable conservation of fundamental processes and......istant memory, does not form in a mutant strain of flies bearing a mutation in the gene called radish. Unti...ens and rodents. The current genetic findings from flies therefore suggest that the radish/phospholipase A2-dependent form of memory spans distantly related ...